Combating artificial intelligence with natural stupidity.

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Cake day: September 13th, 2024

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  • You can run a local LLM capable of assisting in software development for less energy than running a AAA video game. I’m not denying the environmental impact of the current AI landscape, but I kind of disagree that it’s intrinsic to LLMs as a whole, I think it’s more a symptom of capitalism and its disregard for sustainability causing everything it touches to have a high environmental cost.

    Also, nearly all modern computing has high environmental costs, certainly all cloud computing. I think instead of focusing on AI only, it would be more helpful to engage in a broader discussion on how computing can be made more energy efficient as a whole, and do proper cost benefit analysis of all things we use computers for, including but not limited to LLMs. We may well still conclude from that process that we need to stop using LLMs, in which case we should.

    If you’re against LLM use on environmental grounds (which I’m not disagreeing with), I submit to you that we should take the idea even further and things like gaming, video streaming, high frequency trading, social media, and any other nonessential computing should be on the same chopping block for the same reason. Applications of computing that we also use at scale with high environmental impacts, but that have been normalised and practically seen as a right by many of the same people against any amount of AI use (not saying that’s you, speaking generally). Why should AI be the only thing we raise concerns about if we’re to raise concerns? Doing environmental protection piecemeal by independently targeting single things and not the entire system has been shown time and time again to not work at best and make it worse at worst.




  • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.mlChina Is About To Pop The AI Bubble
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    2 days ago

    China is good at compressing the existing models by stealing the answers they give you to make models that have equivalent performance that are way cheaper (plagiarism)

    Lol plagerism is when they take your shitty product and actually make it better apparently. Begs the question why China manages to succeed at this when Western companies that own the original product can’t. You’d think they’d always be one step ahead of those damn plagerising Chinese scum or at least would be able to do the exact same thing China does.

    Also if you’re calling plagerism on this I’m calling plagerism on all of AI. You can’t accept any generative AI while simultaneously pearl clutching when someone else plagerises your country’s AI. So pick one. Either we ban all AI for plagerising all of humanity or we don’t give a shit when one AI company plagerises another.



  • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    7 days ago

    Technically valid but extremely rich coming from a US state of all places.

    https://iowaspulse.com/iowa-flock-license-plate-cameras-privacy/

    Safe to say they’re not against spying in general.

    If you’re an average American, the spying Iowa allows and embraces put you in far graver danger than spying by China who doesn’t give a shit about you or what you have to say about them. America, as we’ve seen, cares slightly more about what Americans say than China does.

    I’d stay clear of Temu mainly because it’s a shitty platform replete with blatant scams and you risk losing your money. Go to an actually reputable Chinese site if you want to buy from one, or don’t if you don’t.

    Also don’t buy cloud/app enabled cameras if you give a shit about privacy. From anywhere, period, because doing so guarantees you’ll be spied on by someone, China or otherwise. Roll your own local network camera system with hardware and software you control or get ones that only record to local storage with no smart features.




  • I mean, unless they’re directly cutting up old buildings into the final block shape for this (which would be a nightmare to actually do), it doesn’t actually help that much. You can’t practically un-make concrete and turn it back into that slurry that comes out of the mixer truck, AFAIK all “recycled” concrete means is old concrete gets crushed into fragments and used in place of gravel. But the gravel is not the truly problemic part, you still need more cement to bind those fragments into your desired shape, which releases carbon and consumes water.

    (Reposted from another reply in the same thread)



  • I mean, unless they’re directly cutting up old buildings into the final block shape for this (which would be a nightmare to actually do), it doesn’t actually help that much. You can’t practically un-make concrete and turn it back into that slurry that comes out of the mixer truck, AFAIK all “recycled” concrete means is old concrete gets crushed into fragments and used in place of gravel. But the gravel is not the truly problemic part, you still need more cement to bind those fragments into your desired shape, which releases carbon and consumes water.


  • Concrete has a very high carbon footprint. The manufacturing of cement liberates a lot of CO2 that had previously been in the ground as minerals. Different reaction from burning fossil fuels but indistinguishable as far as the atmosphere is concerned. Not to mention cement plant furnaces are usually fossil fuel powered.

    Since the blocks are not (as) structural, less cement and more gravel/old concrete fragments can be used which would mitigate this to some extent, but I’d still imagine this is pretty similar to electric cars where it takes a significant portion of its service life to even reach net zero from the carbon released from building the thing.

    Concrete is quite possibly the worst material ecologically speaking for this application. Presumably it was chosen for its physical properties, but still. I do wonder if just using straight stone quarried directly into the final block shapes could mitigate some of this, since concrete is basically just stone whose shape and composition we can control, and either way the same mass of material needs to be mined out of the ground so I imagine they’d break even on mining ecological footprint. In fact, if you just need something heavy to store gravitational potential energy, and water is not viable for whatever reason, why not use crushed cars or something?

    I get why China wants to explore this, they’re just putting some chips into all emerging technologies just in case, but I’m still of the “just use the excess energy instead of trying to store it” camp. Storing energy at grid scale is just not practical with our current technology, 100MWh is basically nothing at the level of entire countries’ electricity demands, a single city goes through that in a very short amount of time. For example, data centres could be required to only use excess renewable energy for non-real-time computation like training AI, or scientific computation, since they’re a load that can ramp up or down almost instantly. Or you can make hydrogen from water or even hydrocarbons from the air with the excess energy, for things like airplanes and rockets that don’t yet have a viable path out of burning stuff to work. Or, since the majority of the world’s electricity is still fossil fuel based, just build infrastructure to send that energy to where it’s needed because there will always be somewhere that could ramp down a fossil fuel plant and use renewable instead. I think only after all electricity is renewable can storage really become viable, and technology will have long advanced by then and all the primitive storage schemes we come up with now will be obsolete anyway, so while I do support experimenting with storage methods (which this seems to be), actually committing to building out a ton of storage right now seems premature and a poor investment of our limited effort and resources.